Series: Stewardship
Category: Core Seminars
Detail:
Stewarding Your Skills
PRAYER
Introduction
Welcome to the second-to-last class in the stewardship core seminar. We started by looking at the stewardship of money, viewed through Jesus’ parable of the talents in Matthew 25. The point is not ultimately how much we give, as if God needs our money. The point is what your handling of money says about the glory and goodness of the Master, of God. Does that stewardship evidence risk-taking obedience? That is, does it evidence faith? Then we took that sample principle and applied it to different gifts God’s given us other than money. Health, rest, time—and today one last gift, our skills.
What does God think of our skills: our capabilities and our capacity? Obviously His skills are far better than ours and He can accomplish whatever he wills without us. So does God value what we can do? And if so, why?
In a moment, we’ll answer that question. But first, let’s get off on the right foot by thinking through what’s distinctly Christian about this conversation. So here’s a question for the class: How should a Christian think differently about their skills compared to the world’s view of skill?
Now, there are a couple of things at stake in getting this right. First, joy. Unless we understand how skill fits into stewardship, we won’t understand joy as God designed us for. Conversely, I think a lot of frustration we experience in this life about the limitations of our skills and capacity comes from misunderstanding what stewardship really means. And second, eternal treasures. What we do in this life matters for the next—and much of that comes down to our skills.
To get started, let’s frame everything we talk about today with one passage: 1 Peter 4:10-11. You’ll see it there in your handout.
“As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
Four observations from that passage will form the outline of our class. First, your skills come from God. No surprise if you’ve been with us for the first 11 weeks of this class—but that idea shows up again in this verse. Second, he gave you those skills to show off his glory—verse 11. Third, your skills are a stewardship: given by God for God. And fourth, skills are for service to others.
Skills Come From God
As each has received a gift. From whom? God, of course. Another way of stating this comes from a verse that’s been referenced throughout the past 11 weeks: “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7).
But wait just a second, you say. That may be true for some things—like innate intelligence. But other skills are things I worked really hard at. My ability to play the piano… that’s thousands of hours of practice. I went to culinary school to learn how to cook. My writing skills were years in the making. What do you mean they came from God?
Well, who gave you the opportunity to get that education? Who gave you the ability and the time to hone your craft over the years? Where did you get the desire, motivation, and joy in performing in the first place? Who gave you the parents and teachers that would encourage your talents in unique ways? God has done it all, he is the source of all good. Psalm 16:2, “I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” Let’s walk through three important implications of our skills being given to us by God:
God delights in your skill
Think of Proverbs 22:29 that we quoted a few weeks ago. “Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.” You feel the delight, the pride of the author in that verse. Or in Exodus, God grants ability to his people so that his tabernacle might be crafted with skill. Exodus 31 says that the Lord filled Bezalel “with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft… and I have given to all able men ability, that they make all that I have commanded you.” Or Psalm 33:3, “Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings.” God loves skill and as we can see from these examples, he uses it to his praise and glory!
God gets the credit for your success
Think back to God’s warning to the Israelites in Deuteronomy as they got ready to enter the Promised Land. “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.” (Deut. 8:17-18) Not my power, but God who gives me power.
There’s a joy that comes from skills well-used that’s good, right, and God-honoring. But how often do we boast about things we have no right to boast about? [professional athletes]. “If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” That’s a really hard lesson to learn!
Limits in skill are also from God
Your lack of skill is also from God. If he’s the one who gave, he’s also the one who decided not to give you what you lack. That’s true of your capabilities; that’s also true of your capacities. What you can do and how much you can do it are limits fixed by God, and those limits are good! Now, we have a responsibility and a joy before God to strategically work to expand both of those. Both our capability and our capacity—that’s how he’s designed us. And we shouldn’t confuse rest in God’s sovereignty with the lazy rest of the sluggard. But aside from those caveats, your limits are from God just as much as your skills. Psalm 16:6, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.”
We might ask: why hasn’t God given me more of a particular skill or why don’t I have this particular ability like this other person? Well, tying back to the previous point that God gets the credit for our success, oftentimes our lack in ability and insufficiency are merciful reminders that we are wholly dependent on the Lord. Think of Gideon and how God said to him: “the people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel boast over me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me’ (Judges 7:2). And so the Lord instructs Gideon to trim his men down from 32,000 to 10,000 and then finally to 300. Not only that, but the military battle was won with torches, trumpets, and jars… no sharp weapons, just old-school flashlights and noisemakers. There is no doubt who saves Israel. And when God gets the glory, we are protected from seeking out our own. He has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, what is weak in the world to shame the strong, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God (1 Cor. 1:27-29).
Question: How should the truth, that all skill comes from God, shape our hearts? Or what attitude of the heart should result from acknowledging that all our skill comes from the Lord?
Now let’s flip to the inside of the handout. Take a look at that chart to the right. For the rest of our time together, we’ll work through the outline on the left side of the handout. As we do that, try filling out the chart to the right if you’re able. Think of three skills that God’s entrusted you with. You’ll see a hypothetical example there: ability to write clearly. Then write down how you’ve seen God bring glory to himself through each particular skill. Or how he could. Take some time to think about how each skill could serve others. And lastly, what good stewardship of each skill will look like over the next several years—which could include laying one or more of them aside. Then at the end of this class we’ll talk through some examples. So again—fill out this chart to the best of your ability as we move through the next few points.
III. Your Skills Exist to Glorify God
So, back to our outline. If God gave you your skills, why did he give them to you? Well, as we saw in 1 Peter 4, to glorify himself. Look back to that passage on the front of your handout. Peter gives us two examples of skills. We speak using God’s words. We serve using God’s strength. So that “in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.”
Now, in a Christian church, that’s a term we throw around a lot. “To the glory of God.” What does that actually mean? It means that God gave you the gifts he did, skills included, in order to display how incredible he is. If we look back to the parable of the talents, the fate of the third servant showed that what mattered wasn’t so much the money the first servants made but what their faithfulness showed about the Master. They bet everything that he would be true to his word, and so their actions proclaimed that he was trustworthy and generous. What matters is not so much what you do as much as what doing it shows about the worth of our God. Here in 1 Peter 4, our words show off the wisdom of his words. Our strength shows off the power of his strength. As you use your skills as God intended, it should call attention not to you but to God!
It can be easy to feel like my time is my own. Even easier to feel like my body is my own, that my money is my own—I earned it after all, didn’t I? But maybe easiest of all is to think that my skills and capabilities are my own. They’re so intrinsic to my identity after all—and I pursued, cultivated, and worked hard for many of them. But far from being about displaying my worth, the skill God’s given me is for the purpose of displaying his worth. And the skill God’s given you is for displaying his worth. But how does that happen?
Here’s three ways our skills can show off the glory of God.
Your skill is God’s means of provision
As Martin Luther put it, we pray for our daily bread at night and in the morning the baker rises to bake it. If a doctor treats a person’s medical condition and that person is healed, would it be wrong for them to thank God instead of the doctor? Of course not! That healing is from God; the doctor’s skill was merely a means he used. The more skilled you are at your work, the more God can use you as his agent in his common grace ministry of provision for this world.
Your skill shows off God’s skill
How? Because he made it! He’s the one who gave it to you and so he takes delight as you use it. Imagine teaching a friend how to ski. And as they figure it out and delight in doing it right, you take delight too. Not only because you taught them that skill but because when they discover how fun it is to get it right, they now share in what you love. But of course when God delights in seeing us use the skill he’s given us, it’s not just “look how amazing that is ” but “see how amazing the Lord is ”, the one who is the originator and source of that skill. Which leads us to a third way your skill can show off the glory of God:
Your skill reveals God’s wisdom in creation
In a sense, skilled work is nothing more than a rediscovery of God’s good creation. Imagine the skilled scientist making a discovery and God’s pleasure with the finding, like: “Yes! I’ve been waiting for you to figure that one out. Isn’t it amazing?” Or the artist discovering the beauty of arranging things in a particular way with a particular medium. God takes delight in his creation being discovered, appreciated, and marveled at. Our skills can be put to use to discover innovation or efficiency or beauty or joy or healing or any number of things. And in all this, we’re simply walking God’s footsteps after him. Delighting in a more beautiful way to assemble the pieces of this world he’s made. Discovering something God has always known. And so it shows off his wisdom and his goodness.
So not only is your skill from God – it’s for God. Your capabilities and your capacity aren’t about showing off your worth but God’s. You are all about him .
Any questions or thoughts?
Your Skills Are a Stewardship
So if skill is from God and for God, what role do you play? 1 Peter 4: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” Well, what does it mean to be a good steward of the grace God’s given you in the skills he’s entrusted to you? We’ll discuss three basic categories for what it looks like to steward our skills well.
Pursue excellence
Listen to Paul in Colossians 3:23, speaking to bond-servants: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men…you are serving the Lord Christ.” Whatever you do, pursue it with excellence because ultimately you’re working for King Jesus! Pursue excellence as you clean your home, as you serve at church, as you change a diaper, as you go about a seemingly monotonous task at work, as you lead a Bible study. Sometimes it’s good to relax, to go slow. But there’s no room for us Christians to be careless, half-hearted, “well, I suppose that’s good enough” in how we use our skills. Stewardship is worship.
Invest in your skills
Like Paul learning to be a tentmaker so he could more effectively advance the gospel. Like so many other gifts God’s given us to steward, we can grow our skills.
Now, many people think of this as an over-educated city—which may well be true for a segment of our population. But I think the priority of investing in your skills is fairly important here in Washington, DC. In general, there are two ways that people get paid in their jobs. Some of us get paid for our time; others get paid for our skill. And there are many, many DC jobs—especially in the political world—where your only asset is your willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done. That’s no recipe for a balanced life. As Jamie Dunlop has said more provocatively to our college students before, you can either sell your skill or you can sell your soul. When you’re young, in your early twenties, most of us don’t have too many marketable skills. So go ahead and sell your time. But as the years pass, wisdom would dictate that we develop a skill that others will pay for. That’s the ticket to affording DC without selling yourself entirely to your job—whether you’re a plumber or working in politics. Nothing about this advice is specific to any one strata of society. And we can’t assume education and skill are necessarily the same thing. Education can help build a skill set—but there are plenty of schools out there hawking degrees that don’t actually put you any closer to having a marketable skill set.
Now, speaking of education, let me take a brief detour and give some advice about the decision to pursue further education—which is a decision that many in a congregation as young as ours are likely to make. If you’re in that situation, let me give you three questions to ask:
Will this education improve my skill set across a broad set of responsibilities? Keep in mind that God has placed multiple responsibilities in your life: at work, in church, in your family, in your neighborhood. Education can help in all those areas. One example could be the individual who pursues a teaching degree, where the skills they obtain could be transferred to teaching others at church. Teaching could help care for the children or teens of other members. Here’s another example: considering education that leads to skills and abilities that could be easily relocated overseas in order to support mission work. Any time education can help improve your faithfulness in multiple areas of responsibility, it has special value for the Christian.
The second question about education might seem somewhat at odds with the first. And that is, how easy is it to get paid for the credential you’ll get. Some degrees (say, as a CPA or a nurse) are easy to value monetarily. Because simply having the credential has a measurable impact on your earning power. Others, like a degree in creative writing, may well improve the value of your mind (question #1) yet not easily translate into earning potential. I think the most practical relevance of this distinction is that we should be very reluctant to go into financial debt for a degree that doesn’t have clear financial value.
Which leads to a third question: for how long will this degree constrain my choices? It may be more helpful to think of debt in terms of time and not money because of the nature of debt as a form of servitude (Proverbs 22:7) that we talked about a few weeks back. How long will it take to pay that back—or how long is your commitment to the military or your employer in place of debt? What’s the likelihood that God will change your circumstances during that time such that you might wish you hadn’t taken on that obligation? For example, going overseas as a missionary or getting married. Obviously, the longer you’re constrained, the more likely that your circumstances will change in that timeframe. And keep in mind that many opportunities for education carry implied time constraints beyond the time of the degree and the debt. For example, if you go to vocational school for carpentry but never receive on-the-job instruction from a skilled and experienced carpenter, you don’t have the full skill set. Very often, it’s education plus some quantity of experience that gives you the base-level skill set that you’re looking for.
Lay aside some skills
OK – that was all in the second point within Roman numeral III, invest in your skills. But let me finish this section with one last implication of our skills being a stewardship. Sometimes you’ll need to decide when to lay aside some skills. A good steward says yes to some options and no to others. Think of Peter laying aside his skills as a fisherman to follow Jesus. That’s true of our money, our time—and it’s also true of our skills. We’re a young church, and this is a constant struggle, especially for the young. When you were a teenager, many of you could afford to invest in pretty much every skill you had. So you were a musician, an athlete, a scholar, a high-end babysitter, a friend, and so forth. But your twenties can be a painful time of deciding to say goodbye to certain skills that you love. You’ve only got so much time. So you abandon athletic skills, focusing on music. Then you let go of your love for the classics to focus on jazz. And then you put aside pedagogy to focus on performance. And so forth. Here’s some advice: just because you can do something well doesn’t mean you are obligated to commit to doing it well. Don’t let God’s gifts become shackles. Look across all of your life. Prayerfully choose which skills you think will allow you to best glorify God across all the responsibilities he’s given you. Invest in them, let the others lay fallow, and trust if you’ve made a wrong choice that really matters, God will make that clear. Your job as a Christian is that old U.S. Army slogan, “Be all you can be” across all of your responsibilities. Sometimes that means laying skills aside.
Now, sometimes you run to the edge of your capabilities or your capacity. Your job or your parenting, for example, require more of you than you honestly can give. What do you do then? Well, you’ve got two choices. On the one hand, you can take limits as God’s guiding hand directing you to something else. On the other, you can fight your limits by improving your capability and your capacity.
How do you know which is right? So hard to say! It’s good to ask first whether the responsibility in question is optional. For example, are we talking about your role as a father or your role as a test pilot? Clearly, one’s optional; the other isn’t. Then, it’s good to ask if there are idolatrous reasons for clinging onto your desire to do something. That would shift the calculus toward moving to something else where you’re already sufficiently skilled. But absent that, you’re probably looking at an area of freedom where, with prayer and the counsel of others, you stay and reskill if you think that is best, or you move to something else.
Your Skills Are For Service
To round out today’s class, let’s look at that last piece of our passage in 1 Peter 4. “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another .”
That’s not how our world views your skills. Society tells us that your skills are about you. They’re about building wealth, reputation, power, and happiness. But the Bible says that the true path to happiness is to be a servant—of Jesus ultimately and then of each other. Acts 20:35, “Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” True happiness lies not in building ourselves but in spending ourselves.
I think this is an important overlay on everything else we’ve talked about today. How do you decide which skills to invest in, which to lay aside? I hope your primary lens is not one of personal fulfillment but one of service. Which will equip you to best serve others: in your job, family, church, and neighborhood? Now, in God’s kindness there is often convergence between what we enjoy and how we can serve. Presumably, you can work as unto the Lord while doing anything. Yet it’s probably easiest to do that in an area you enjoy. All that taken into account, though, Scripture tells us that enjoyment isn’t the main point—the point is service.
But, that’s not to say you shouldn’t seek to serve in certain areas unless you are 100% passionate about it or only serve when you think your ability meets a particular standard. For instance, if I decide not to serve in childcare or Praise Factory because “I’m not good with little people”, I hope someone would tell me, that’s not a good enough reason. After all, Jesus prayed “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me” in the garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. Drinking the cup of God’s wrath had not a hint of enjoyment for Christ nor was it a task he was excitedly anticipating. Yet the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matt. 20:28). And so he was obedient to the point of death. Jesus even said himself that his “food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). So we in turn should also seek to serve the Lord, even when it involves denying ourselves and taking up our cross.
Conclusion
I mentioned the chart off to the right early in the class. Hopefully you’ve already started filling it out. Just in case you didn’t—or if multitasking isn’t one of your skills—I’ll give you a minute to finish up.
Now for some of you, it may be hard to write anything down either because you feel like you’re boasting or you don’t think your abilities are of much significance. Remember that the Lord is the one who has gifted us all and he has done so in a specific way, in order that he would be glorified.
Can anyone share with us one of the rows in your chart? In addition to sharing what you wrote down, tell us how you might be thinking differently about that skill now that you’ve considered its main purpose as glorifying God through service to others.
Let’s close with a verse: 2 Timothy 2:20-21, on the very back of your handout.
“Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood and clay, some for honorable use, some for dishonorable. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.”
Do you ever worry that you’re wasting your skills? That you’ll never hear those beautiful words, “well done, good and faithful servant?” Then listen carefully to Paul in 2 Timothy 2. Cleanse yourself from what is dishonorable. Pursue Jesus in faithfulness and holiness. And consider this promise: “he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master.” Praise the Lord for his faithfulness.
PRAYER
